come along

Dusk comes with the blessings of ranchera music scraping down the asphalt and a crow sliding on its belly across the icy wind. The light leaves quietly. Soon it’s just me, all cold fingers and pale shins, typing away at the vacancy. Soon it’s just me, smoking and writing to fill in the blanks. Dusk comes on despite the sorry reception. The night weighs down and the dusk comes on.

I always end up outside past my expirations. I always end up ruminating as the night fills in. Too much space and all this empty. The towering firmament and the chain of ache. The carcass torn and burned from the lashes of attachment, the existence livid with insistent wishes. I drag this shambles across the unmarked map, the way made from the destinations we ignore. Songs so old, your ancestors missed them the first time around. Songs so old, you might already know them.

Once, come dusk, I would gaze your way. Once I would mind your horizon when the sun went down. Things change, right and wrong, the spell is broken, the game goes on. Something from that dream of returning to the deep forest. Something of the dream of doorknobs rattling in the hungry night. Now I mostly watch my step come the midnight rambler. Now mostly I feel my way come dawn. I would call you too, if only you’d come along. 

smoke joist

It’s both the language and the spin, the skin all a-tingle, the stacks all astir. It’s the corridors and the alcoves, the skylights and the intersections. The stones and the woodwork, the sizzle and the steak, we always turn up somewhere when and if we wake. The magic is the symbols and how we integrate the soul. The magic in the ratio of blood to ghost.

Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s easy to sit and speculate. Let the smoke climb, let the stars cool, let the world let you have it. All these wag tongue kingdoms, all these wind distributed gods. It’s all fun until you are stretched out upon that altar. It’s all good until the only price is you. So we bask in our power, so we dance in circles around the moon. Joining in the reel while the cold slab of truth watches unblinking from the near periphery. 

Words are full of rooms and hallways, capturing stray want and wander, mingling with the music of being. You never know what you may set upon an unsuspecting reader as they reignite your sign. You never know what you might awaken traveling through the forest of the night. We are so full and so desperately empty, so full of collisions and asides, so busy with every direction at once. The stairways we wander following foot and song. The flame that by burning can only demand more. 

the moon wax mind

Watch the place where you once would look. Focus on the field in question. Let’s face it— I’m always starting it wrong. Your eyes themselves are invocations, the world sparking and sighing as you gaze, smiling and quiet, holding sly secrets on your cunning tongue. You stroll through the niceties of time and lives, spells warm upon your legs, gently singing along. The moon turns over, roots reach, and buds swell. You see your way on through.

You are threaded with intersections, you are bruised by the shadows of gods. All green grows your garden with spring still a stretch away. All bright goes the nursery, running wild and streaming reds and yellows along its beat. The weight of crossed irons and blind blades, blinded by the fire and the dance. You stitch your signature along the precipice, and straight to the center on through. There in the night forest, there in the moon wax mind. The wind scuffs its toe in the dirt and I smell you on my sheets.

The glow of bare skin, the rhythm of wood and bone. Curled smoke filling a lamp shade. The air electric and possessed. All altar and hushed sacrifice, flesh full of ritual. The swelter full of brazen insistence, sweat and tremble. Falling forward into this summoning, the heavens pressing all the places down. Up into the firmament you follow your vision. In the blind sky night you rise. 

unmarked worlds

The daylight paints the fence in muted sun and dappled shadows, bright strips of blue and green peeping between the boards, music spilling out into the sparrow smitten yard. A breeze stirs the frazzled paintbrush of pine needles as the squirrels pursue their campaigns of plunder and self sacrifice. The dogs continue their latest excavations, hunting a separate tribe of rodents. The primary school kids in the field run laps in screaming disarray, cursing at a twelfth grade level. Another day landing where it may, playing out however these things do. I sit wanting things to be the way they aren’t, wishing that it wasn’t you.

Restless nights break on the stony shores of unyielding days, impatient spring showering sparks of bright blossoms and green stalks. The earth wakes in a ruckus of sudden transformation, trembling and seething with root and grub. Little slips and morsels brushing tongue and fingertips, your sly bones a song I keep singing to myself despite the empty left behind. The passage witnessed in moons and skies, measured in clocks and counts. The loss grows longer with the days. 

Box up all the spent letters, put every treasure in some chest. I’ve learned to know my nevers, been schooled up on my place. A still traveler towards the foregone conclusion of the horizon, a sojourner of the mystery unconcerned with the path of no answers. I live in an unmarked world, without record or document. Crows and sparrows and tourist gulls. The turned earth breathes out, star smeared nights shimmering in skins. I pass without proof, the distance curving out of sight. Another moment becoming memory as you become. 

loser

Life’s too short and too long. Waiting for something to happen, watching it fade away. Missing the moment like I measured twice for it. Lately it seems I only stand to get my legs knocked from under me. Sure the thinking makes it so, but the world is always glad to pile on. The lid was loose and all the love got out. Taking each beating in the order I deserve them. Watching every soul I care about shrug and walk away. Another notch on the belt, another one bites the dust.

Moments and mementos, brief interludes of fantasy and long nights alone. The most dangerous lies live inside us. The desperate sense of slipping away, the story time dreams circling our most precious selves, the injuries we learn to conceal so well we end up all wound. Words that have betrayed so often that even writing them hurts. I know there are human pieces missing from me, things I never learned and seem unable to pick up as I go. I lost. It’s that simple. I lose. It’s what I do.

I didn’t plan to be like this. I didn’t plan anything at all. Every day arrives a stranger, every day leaves unknown. I serve my time and do my duty, both poorly. I gripe and grumble, I rage and roar. The years fly on by. 

all blues

There it is— that long sustain, slow and true, bright as day, cool as water. There it is— that muse of fire, carrying vision and bearing time upon the very air. The one note bent, the rhythm swung to either side of the scale. Cymbal and kick drum and the teeming senses, the dense absence between the pianoforte keys holding the shape of the song. It is in your head, it is of your heart, it scrolls through the open tabs and the riffled pages, the mystery and the evidence the moment leaves in your hands. Climb up the drainpipe to heaven’s rooftop, see if there’s a window open to your ingress. 

The songs change, the arrangement strolls down the corridor of style, the genius of one era the embarrassment of another. The framework of every age soaking in the movement of the moment through the mind. Each of us a stitch in the lingo, culture held to the real by the seam of peoples, everyone arriving more by pattern than by intent. Whether barstool or bandstand, street corner or colosseum, the music puts us in our place. 

It is always in the distance, the imminent truth we know is ours. That dream of destiny, the victory lap that spills out of fantasy and into the crumbling streets and lonesome buildings of our lives. I am, so I must be so. The dangers that devour, the foolish misjudgment of our mettle,  the fool’s errands and grand delusions we witness and believe ourselves immune to. To wade through this shame and slaughter, inoculated from ever knowing ourselves, all jewels and crowns and feathers for macaroni. Forever only a direction, immortality a going concern, we claim our luck as destiny. The note held so long because we know the song must end.

echolalia

So goes the greens, so goes the blues, the middle of the sky sight and the restless unseen ocean. So goes the cracks in the pavement, the press of joy and threat in your breath, the sweep of wings behind every last word whispered. The lift and swoop of every story left to tell, the hook of every song left to hear. The long lost and the gathered forevers spilling like petals impatient for the fall.

I said it in case you were listening. I said it just for something to say. Hands in the air like you just don’t care, hands in the air like your money wasn’t your life. The wish it was it wasn’t, the want left there in pieces. The patter like rain, the palaver settled into the bones of the moment, tattered rags motionless on the line. The cold heart untouched by the ambivalent sun.

I guess it was the current custom, the exchange of pleasantries, the volley before the serve. I guess it was a passing fancy, a phase to take in stride. Word for word, stride for stride, the mystery untouched by alibi or explanation. Something to pass the time between doses of real life. Something to bury in palliatives and the severed light of stars. 

save the date

The old dead habit resurrected for a reason in remittance, I spent the day running through hoops and ideating with particular specificity. Sound and fury foolishness for the most part, a scramble to find direction outside dimensions, the muse of murder and accusations dissatisfied and occluded. The treachery is real enough, whatever the alignment of the intent. I drink some foul elixir, the reminiscence on a loop. 

The physical fails, the doctor cannot seem to place the patient, mirror peer or new moon shadow. The heart sinks in knowing, the floor at once out from under, the truth reconstituted from the gaps in the record. Stratum after stratum of ephemera and marginalia, this sinkhole soul and recollected crimes. Going nowhere as the trail grows cold and the night stands up on its hind legs. It can’t because my kind can’t be trusted.

Make the most of the moment. Make it last, make it count. Time on your hands that never wash clean. Cat gotten tongue that never could tell it true. The candle blown out with wish scented breath, the flame sputters and coils smoke. Could be it has at long last caught up with you. Could be that the beat keeps skipping, a stone slung against the surface of the see. Maybe the moon drowned at last, and the prophecy has shown up drunk and unapologetic. Take a number and save the date. 

where and how

I don’t know where to start. The long lonely night or the chimes stirred by the warm, shifted wind? The redacted blessings or the slow curve of sky? The days bled and the years fleeting, the burden of being a beaten drum, all cost and no value. Dreams lost to the quiet and the cacophony, dreams lost to the myth of sleep. This ridiculous reporting of everything I do not know.

Things slip away. People come and people go. The perfect phrase dissolves in the transit between thought and tongue, loosing a rabble of words like hungry gulls upon your breath. The world is all flash-bangs and calliope, all fun house mirror and carousel, screeching tires and the gutter clatter of brass. Stern warnings from the strata of idiots and flimflammers we pay to make fools of us, we spend our best intentions on the wind. Sleepwalkers repeating the safety warnings as they march straight off the cliff. 

I don’t know how to stop. Free verse and aged out rage. A mantra made from every sleight or misgiving, a magnet made from the iron in my blood. That old saw about how apostates attract, endings to attend to and sorrows to incarnate. An adept of the true confusion, I fuse hues and bend the depths of this shallow resonance. Less than the sum of my parts, more than the words can manage.

mercurial

Last night the hammers of neglect beat down hard on the frame and the ghost, body and brain racked by bad blood and infernal inklings. I didn’t sleep, but that was hardly the worst of it. The  lack of medicine is catching up with me, barely perceivable incremental losses have added up in quantities past counting, the damaged flesh falling hard into disarray. The madness is hitting harder too, leading to this mausoleum mind and horror show heart. The temple, long haunted, at last burning down.

Another day under the belt, already on the edge of the high harrow, the whittle stick moon all but lost above the ruckus and the clamber. The ache still hard upon me and this incendiary feel a fiery fist behind my eyes, I perform the standard issue ablutions, the magic of habit all the context left in play. I brush my teeth before the grim mirror. The pale rider revealed beneath the broken seal, then rinse and spit. Bible stories stuck between my teeth with only floss and physics handy. 

I drag my shadow from light to light, from bare bulb to dusty shade to the porch light throttled by webs. I thump from carpet to hardwood to peel vinyl tile, dragging my tatters through gloom and mood. I dissolve into abandoned dreams and unmarked words, no good done, no good to come. Pick your poison, choose your weapon, they either forget you completely or come flying in a fury. I slump in my chair, shifting until the pain settles. I keep my eyes wide open, on the lookout for sleep’s sweet oblivion. The night turns. 

stain

Release the petals from the bloom,

free the bright from your eye,

this subtle shift in season 

unreasonable in the atmosphere,

a color, a breeze, a graze of clouds

muddying up the myths held so close

you mistook for your self,

that ominous horizon looming

hard in the story of your heart. 

The reach of budding limbs, 

the parsed out piece of sky swaddled

in thick light and blue shadow 

adding up as more than light and eyes,

the hawk on the fence line, 

the fraught prophecies hidden 

beneath scalp and bone, 

the sharp and the hard and

the pooling, cooling life still warm.

The truth wouldn’t bother 

but for the stain left of speech,

the shuddering tumble left

hanging in the air, your mouth

another misdirect, the magic

all bluff and theft. The facts

fixing the look on your face. 

Spilled blood to seal the bargain,

out of the red, into the black.

beat a drum

It is a whole pain day, the head, the heart, and the hand all lit and consumed. Skin slack and sagging, eyes grim and grieving, the hurt just won’t quit. I dragged this shambles down the calendar and up the clock, the ancient instrument beset with spells and enemies. I sat on the porch, reading until the harrowing sorrows set in, all blue sky wards and sunshine shields dissolving in breath and blood. The day went on and on, but night still won the race. The light tries, but there’s always more darkness to go around. 

I’ve been ditched in this dismal oblivion, scoured from the record, stripped of star and score. I seethe and spit and bleat and break. I count the crowns owed splitting, the nails needing driven in, bush bird wishes and handful curses. I idle in the driveway, I browse until the battery drops dead. I’ve forgotten all my passions and worn all the good words clean through. I write this drivel, waiting on the long count. 

You get nothing out of playing along, even less for giving up. The horror of this utter sameness, the world that your wheels can’t touch, the bitterness of the despised and denied. Keep that off switch handy, keep an eye on how much empty’s getting in. Understand the enemies you’ve made so when the undoing comes you know you earned it. Beat a drum like the cooper at the end of that film. Bang the drum slowly like in the chorus of that song. Nothing with words will mourn this passage. No one will even read them right. 

emphasis

The eyes often lack the resolve of the vision, let alone the bent of the lensing, signs overlooked and the witness underwhelmed. Time spent between the screens and sheets of symbolic sediment, the grammar of sieves and gravity’s tongue, shirts and skins and infinite worlds to puzzle out. The reverse engineering suffering from a paucity of data and the weight of case studies, the world always seeming out of sorts. I pick the wrong thread and lose the narrative. I flip a switch and end up squinting from the light.

I want what I want and I want it too much. I’ve learned to do without, but not without complaint. I’m as dumb as the next one, I take to the details that suit me. I drop clauses and weigh emphasis in my favor. It’s no wonder I miss a lot. It turns out the case against me is usually pretty strong. Believe me, I’m as shocked as you.

Always the words that start out askew, plus the goblins, imps, and bugaboos. Always a trap waiting near the treat. Springing down a steep wooded hill so fleet and spry, a hair’s breadth between flight and falling. The dashing delirium so familiar from the dream. The itching and burning of that stubborn inner light. The lessons learned for burned bridges and lost worlds. Each day the ruckus of the lexicon. Each night these burdens born anew. The believer always ready to betray. 

in the blue

It’s in the blue, but the blue is in the batteries, fully facile in and out of the abstracts, there before seen or said. The part of the world shaken from heart and head, the hidden and the filler,  the ghost that’s there when the engine idles. Scent maps and symbolic congruents, the residue left in the fittings of each word, the sky that was spoken before it was seen. A slender place holder for slabs of shared mind, the sizzle there because of the heat and the steak, the piecework puzzle all mystery and busywork. But even so, that was the sky with every strike. Blue despite the buds and limbs and wings and clouds. Blue like a shirt’s sample swatch. Blue like the sky blue sky. 

Life goes on like a stream, it goes on like the show must, like lit fuse or freed fire. There’s a lot of it all at once, and most of it is plate spinning. This is a thing that I am doing, therefore it must be done, an import driven out of thin air, as fleeting and feral as any whim. But your act is your act, and the show must even so, so there you go. The color of the sky, the color of your eyes, words and pictures and all the laden empty. Stories that follow the path of the moon or the guttering of the altar wax. Stories to explain the inferno in so many steps. 

Sometimes all the stuff that doesn’t happen adds up to something too. The crow calls from one corner, some loose kids yell from the other. Sometimes there’s a side to the street where nothing happens. Sometimes there are relics resistant to causality’s insistence. Rising and falling despite sun or season. Words spelled out somewhere before the pictures were filled in. Some huddled hush, some gathered strays. Someone speaks close and wings beat the blue.

room

The hours close in, the place sleep adjacent, the incense smoke a silken smudge upon the dust and grime. False constellations cling to the ceiling. Every shadow takes its place. 

All the clamor of the weather and the clock, branches beating down. Less a life than a history of breathing. Less a living but the ritual of the every day. 

Go ahead and lock the doors. Go ahead and leave a light. The words weren’t meant to be enough, and there was never room for anything else. 

soup tooth

The bitter settles deep, towards the soul of the flavor, down in the marrow of the tongue. Burnt from smoke and epithets, from the sheer devilry of invective coming forth in sheets. Our souls inked into flesh and face, time always taking its portion off the top, wizened and wrecked and hollowed out. Arriving with a sigh and a change of atmosphere, not much for protagonists, but about as ordered for ghosts. All wired up and state of the art right before the art took a turn, the relics spark and murmur. A crackle somewhere between inside and out. A voice speaking ill tidings softly in the dark.

The unknown road races with your witness, headlights and road signs. Warnings of curve and grade, sundered momentum and the artifacts of law. The sort of remembering that you know all along, waiting somewhere between the words and the say so. The restless periphery and the blinding brace of light. You are there where you were always headed. You ever adherent of your arc. 

Mostly it burns away upon reentry. The heartfelt honor and the weight of duty gone as the ascendant returns. The evidence of the evolution like a declarative irrelevance, the latter days of the elder architecture showing their age. The bones grow thither and the code goes awry, teeth relieved of the burden of bone. The smile a relic of the rictus of terror received, the friendly reminder to beware. That open doorway, that pitch black night. Shadows in the windows. A shape waiting in the corner. 

habituate

Another day strung from inference to inference, another day of jumped assumptions. The calendar has it one way, the earth spins it different. One imagines words will be had. Sometimes you’re the cold that carries over, sometimes you’re the red past the reason spent. The limits and the sky beyond. The ought and what you’re used to. 

The wind’s indifference touches your skin, threading a chill through your being. So little difference between here and gone, the turn of the page and the story wanders on. There’s no story that’ll stick you, no unknown to scry to prophesy you to safety. So many centers, so many selfs, so many wrecks to walk away from. Gather up the circumstances and work it any direction it takes.

The day put out and the night on strong, something icy in the revenant wind rising. Stern and strange, the stumbling forward feel of the senses coming to. The waking a momentary cease of singing, the song reeling on and on. To say it the way they placed it. To read it the way you were taught. Every moment the rush to judgement. Waiting for the words to work. 

read the room

The road runs dark, like the long prelude to thunder, like that sinking feeling fast on the rise. The road runs down, branch and bramble clambering out the ditch. A stippled welt of blackberry thorn beads darkly upon bare flesh. The clinging of the scenery, the puzzling of the path. A drawn breath, a crackle like bone. 

The heart meanwhile chokes upon its poems. It attempts the stairs as its legs give way, the peril ever pressing, love constantly hanging on its hinges or ridden out on a rail. All its stiff necked gasping never made it a contender. You know because you know, however hard the heart has saying it. You know because you’re here and now instead of there and then. 

The meat of the memory pawed like a fetish in a fervor. The dark ought of once was always an alcove just out of sight. Backlit by spent expectations and hinted dreams, the kisses still cling. The once upon a time we play at ever after. The contender there and gone. The buzzing neon vacancy always on. 

save the ache

A tongue slip perhaps, a stutter over syllables not ready for release, everything lost save the ache. Everyone having misspoken at once. The burn after turn down service still in the works, the stories are repurposed and misfiled. Only the occasional intelligence intercepted by some useless plug. Only the seesaw of sentience loosed upon the path to the playground. The relic of the map read wrong. 

So the fire devours, so the moon melts away. The place marked only by its passing. Another way to round the count. A hunger that teaches the harness. A strop to mark the spot. Awareness there to watch the switchboard and rewrite the plot. The appetite there to whet.

It happens once we catch the habit. The words work us how they want. A simple touch exhumed by recognition. The trembling of the truth in your bones, the way you know you know.  It hurts past all nerve and purpose. A haunting of the heart. 

nothing like anything new

Another day of wild winds and dogs sitting still in the sun, the playlist on repeat. A tincture of prescience beading glibly on the tip of your careless tongue. Swallowing what may well be coffee, alternating sparrows and squirrels, I glom onto the composition. The foundation and the firmament buck and sway, fleeting sky, turning earth. The signal and the switch.

Eyes squint though steeped in shadow, analog static fizzing through the physics, travelers depart together to the tune of silence as the winds grow warm. Woke to the westering full on moon, a decree upon the waiting day. Now the dusk is spun, home bound commuters and the worshipful path before, traffic counted in blur and hush. Bones livid with the moment, I trail smoke and sigh, waiting with the world in turn.

The minutes pass as sinking, the slow gray drawl mixing with the blue sky blue above. Witness the weight, witness the spill of years as patches fog and bleary resignation. The burnt down horizons as the mortality started adding up. The scores all settling themselves. Still this mad insistence, this place held among the numbers, this stubborn animal grandiosity. The purity of this bright fury, holding every direction down. The deep fade of an ordinary dusk. 

this fleeting

The night there all at once as if forever, the moon’s bright path cast down through wind and pine, the bare limbs tossed and troubled against Orion’s belly. The cost of everything counting on the bill come due. The strange peak of sky and shadow, the dancing in the dark bramble, feet falling by feel and count. Nothing as forever as this fleeting night. No one at home save the howling wind and the orphaned shore. 

Steel cup and black coffee. The temple full of loitering ghosts, the moon singing stolen songs, as the forest tangles in the wander of minds. Blood and bone spin their tales of tooth and nail, the long stairway spiraling into the depths, the sense of footsteps following softly in the dark. Life is legions of eyes and mouths always on you, a series of disappearances and accumulations, a set of symbols holding us by each name. Each bitter sip a bad mouthed multitude. Each letter sent a better left unsaid. 

All the secrets growl and whimper, the lectern of moonlight spilling down your legs as the words fill the ample. All the winds rush and rollick, tearing the shingles off the roof, setting a chill above the eaves. At once entangled and unraveled, the being fades in and out. Hands grasped and held breath, the wonder witnessed. Heaven is how you make it happen. 

the elder bones

Gull shadow and crow wing, the stretch of surface and sunset glow upon the house fronts I face catching the last curls of life in silhouette, the roster riddled with upstarts and back stab assassins. Seated with my back to the hurtling ever onward, perched upon the edge of archetype, the border of the once worlds and which worlds a trick of mind and light. The epiphany still lingering despite the willful discord I invite, the words all at once as if spoken aloud in my skull. The passing of an ordinal dog, the clock down to its last count. The opining of the cats and the wind.

The earth turns over and sends forth its shadow, the blue heaven bright stretch of sight before the stars are stitched on the last fluttering of the day’s drowsy eyes. These plates to keep spinning, these circles to spell out. The crows slowly coursing to their roost, the bitter slip of tongue weighing every breath. All things bright and beautiful plus sirens and car alarms. A bass note dragged along every door and window. A shaking that is necessitated by the placement of root and flesh. The elder bones crack and seethe. 

I suppose it is the slow burn, the ratio of stimulus to story telling, the holes left in language by lost symbols. I suppose it is the flow between forms, the race of wave after wave. I crack my neck, I trail smoke, I rattle in and out of static. There is a momentum of the world yet to be, a sweltering of intention, animal actions and craven alibis. There is a buckling of being as the framework folds, a vast collapse as meaning shifts its stance. A bright light as the physics gets serious. The rest is blast and burn and aftermath. A moment of silence before the words start piling on.

nighthouse

It’s the sort of day where I can’t face the sunset, the sort of day when I can’t look the moon in the eye. Suddenly I’m all banker’s  hours and rolling up early, locks set on door and gate, the dogs loosed to do their worst. Lights on early through dusty hall and reeking room, a slab of animal, the hint of incense, black mold and lingering smoke. The way a haunting starts, through brute habit and lost count. The way the cycling seals itself in. 

Cold hands and bitter teeth, squinting and spitting away the time. Shelves laden with tome and relic, sealing wax and turned lines, signal and static weighing down the wood. Black coffee steaming with cruel intent. The porch lights lit against the clinging glow, the sun scratching at the hull of the night. We gather our magics and totter through the scene. 

Careful when you clamber up the altar. Careful where you spend your prayers. The hour is always getting later. Tears come due more certain than rain, reason more a stranger than even justice. Best save your receipts. Locked away and all used up with the lights turned on. Madness gambols and gallops on the tumbled breeze. Miracles may come and go through the deep passage of the night. This allotted portion, this sop of plot. The part I can neither know or tell.

restrung

Out where the inside eyes turn around, out upon that edge of breath, the almost dreaming insists, all kisses and skins. The slipping under the surface self rising by immersion, head first and all at once head and shoulders above the moment. The long slow fall of light, the ever headlong night a tug and a tumble while the moon weighs on the mind. The self recedes, the insistence of the almost happened and the should have been, contradictions and counterpoints falling endless down the spiraling stairs of recollect. Only the organism paces the cage, the spirit a relentless habit. A hollow with the whole world to wear upon. The illusory end painted on the scenery.

It’s all orbits and appetites, the who you know and how you serve them of it. The long path of happenstance, the swallow dropped, the arrow loosed, the armory of old saws and workhorses left skulking in the alcoves of allusion. The shortest distance between two points is a lie. We turn on the tricks we play upon our light, such a sad and starveling flame. The explanations left scattered reckless in our wake. Just a misplaced object worrying a missed mark. Just an instrument in need of strings. 

Days they come, days they go. They go and they stay gone, the names all sold for numbers, the meaning always meant to miss. The flesh trembles a little, then collapses into dust. A shell game without the shells, telephone turning the whispers around in their syllables, the dance only kept alive by dancing. The animals as they clatter and they scramble, the animals as they writhe around the fire. This moon pushing in on every naked thought. The abandon as the wheels spin. The desperation of this shared breath. 

when and if

You hear the song and you say it sounds like angels because it is so beautiful. Or it sounds like angels because it is so fearsome. But mostly you say it because it’s the sort of thing people say, when and if they say such things. The angel says rejoice and everyone runs away. There’s always some stone someone needs a hand with. There’s always some seal that’s just waiting for a shovel. The angel says your name like you’re already a volunteer.

Maybe you’re day dreaming about a sandwich, or tacos from that one truck. Maybe you don’t know you’re hungry until you’ve devoured something. Appetite reverse engineered from grease and wrapper, shine and paper and withheld sanctimony. It’s baby steps and basics, one foot in front of the other like Rudolph in that Rankin/Bass relic. How quick they get to strike the scenery. Look at the map and marvel at how far you’ve gone. Listen carefully while heaven sings along.

The change so strange from major to minor, another chestnut serving verse. There is a chill in the air and a blue to the sky, a train that rattles and wails on by. There are the scattered sparrows and the fervent squirrels, crows mostly seen in flight. Wave upon wave, the songs of birds, the songs of stars, the singing to the root and stone. Bones sear and breath breaks and the world grinds its gears. The angels sing your name aloud. Maybe you scream along.

over turn

It’s late enough to wonder, but still too early for the asking hour. After dinner but not too late for one more cup. Some movie blathering in the background, the glasses smudged from adjusting. Two bites of sweet to one of salt, the time idle on the tongue. The sacred by the bushel, the blasphemy in small morsels. Awaiting constellations, we come to parley with the moon. 

There is something of the first cup of coffee, of that cloud busting smoke. The ignition of these little rituals, the engine turning in tiny bursts. The black bitter heat, the sweet curl of fume imbued with breath and blood, the allotted slips and sparks that allow time to pass unharried by angst and alarm. The righting of the over turned cup, the tap and turn of the biding burn. Bruised and blessed we while. 

The stamp and tantrum of every letter spelled word runs down the page I still somehow imagine as flecked with pulp and drinking ink, instead of this dull simulacrum slipping shine down screens. I burned a few prayers and uncoiled my soot into the locked box sky. Like stolen wishes and blown kisses, I attend to my departure. The night thick with it and the moon bleeding bright.

fold

Never mind the ice in the wind carrying the covenant. Never mind the shine of the spilled milk moon. I close my eyes when there’s nowhere else to go. The dark fulfills its bargains. The sharp transition to phantom. The blood bought intention riding out the waves. I shift my feet, I change the song. Luck always takes its portion off the top. If I was a betting man, I’d bet I wasn’t.

They make a lot of playing the hand you’re dealt, but sometimes it’s smarter to fold. It depends on the game everyone’s playing, and that’s the sort of thing no one ever really knows. So much relies on the hidden stacks in other heads, on recognizing the song when it’s on. The failure to recognize that aiming doesn’t matter much to the ones you didn’t mean to wing. The tale unwound by the carousel going around and around. The ritual discarding. 

Keep it in your shoulders, keep it in your back. Keep it in the nightmares that won’t let you sleep. Even the forgotten go somewhere. Every mirror swallowed, light and all. The old song will come on, and the tears will come calling. Now the night leans in and the wind howls through. I fold without turning over one card. 

with all the better angels gone

The wind howled through this afternoon beneath a half moon sunken shell blue into the sky. The trees all set to do their dervish dance, sweeping and swaying up the heavens. The people commit their ceremonies, flagged out and swaddled in mythic finery, in worship of factory fresh deities and empty selves yet to crack. I am clad in smoke and wails of Sleater-Kinney, the mystery never asking how it works. The sun brushes up against the budding tree nearest and a breeze stirs scene. Nothing is ventured at every turn and twist. It all fits, just some pieces are for pictures you’ll never see.

I pause for a moment, letting the words hang. I sip some coffee, I take a drag of smoke. I stare at the street outside my caging, filling with long shadows as the sunlight climbs up the house front, cold despite all the blue and the bright. My gaze is the strop to whet all appetites, this occluded, ancient engine turning the words wanting, this misfit architecture as binding as the iron we orbit. I hold the coffee close enough to kiss, blowing steam over the steel mug lip and the black elixir still changing states. The wax on moon bright above, the world stirs everywhere at once.

The world is made of warnings, it spins in endless alarm, caroming through the neighboring unfathomables with the moon all stalk and stan on its heels. The tide of sky is ever changing and the earth is never still beneath our feet. The dead accumulate on our least trafficked roads, and the flocks and schools and swarms of the earth are disappearing like dreams in the day. All the signs say stop, and still we wheel madly along, on and on and ever so much more. Riding these tidal forces wave by wave, fearlessly plucking the wings of heaven’s host. Wave a flag, say some words. Watch what is left to come with all the better angels gone. 

middle

There is a weariness that comes with being, the arduous descent into the mystery sounding out as pop and grind, the grunt and huff driven from the chakra linkage as I go about getting up. All duct tape and expletives, I simulate the forms. Burn it down before the fade away, spit blaspheme and hyperbole until the words split their seems. This isn’t prayer it’s the bones of the code. This isn’t poetry, it is a counterinsurgency of the antecedent. The stubborn streak of heat and hunger. The naked tongue from root to seed. Every cell aggrieved and spitting sparks.

I can’t say I know what time it is, though I’m always watching some clock. Doing time in every skin I shed. Staring out over the heads of the here and now. Reading about the moment in the trades. All these years of rolling stones and walking in place counted in reflected gazes and inadvertent words. Cookies full of blank fortunes. Salt spilled in little constellations on the table where you are waiting still.

It isn’t the rush of leaving, the goodbye tears tempered with the ascendant departure, the press of bodies moving objects, the discarding of fluids belts and footwear. The strange rituals of escape won’t meet us halfway. It’s not the grace of arrival, existence again contracting to roads and streets and unremarkable domiciles. A room, a bed, a someone waiting to hold. It is the head leaned against the awkward window, the stranger bucking at your back. The place between stories. The middle that barely leaves a mark.